Rate-Splitting Multiple Access With Conjugate Beamforming for Cell-Free MIMO

This work studies rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) approaches in cell-free MIMO systems with the purpose of improving minimum rate performance of user equipments (UEs) served in the network. For a scalable design, conjugate beamforming (CB) is considered while the power control variables are optimized with an iterative majorization minimization (MM) algorithm. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of the proposed design of CB for common signal and the advantage of RSMA over conventional space-division multiple access.